The Hollywood writers' strike has given home-grown films a chance to shine
in Venice. Add the eclectic tastes of director Marco Mueller and this is an
event like no other.

This year's Venice Film Festival got off to a cliché-ridden start: the sun
beat down, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Italy's favourite Americans, flashed
their dazzling Hollywood smiles and signed autographs for adoring fans, the
water taxis threatened to go on strike and the new festival complex was only
half-built (it will be ready by 2011).

Brad Pitt
and George Clooney in 'Burn After Reading' ham it up for the cameras in Venice
photo:Getty Images

Festival director Marco Mueller secured a cracker to set the 65th edition
of the world's oldest film festival in motion, Burn After Reading, a
spy-thriller-cum-comedy by the Coen brothers. Boasting Tilda Swinton and
Frances McDormand as well as Pitt and Clooney, it was the sort of starry
opening for which this festival has been famous since Laurence Olivier won the
top prize in 1948 for Hamlet.

But the blaze of inaugural glory could not conceal the fact that, beyond
the first banquet, the festival fare is rather peculiar and rarified.

True,
a handful of other Hollywood pictures have been scattered over the two weeks.
Highlights include the directorial debut of the Oscar-nominated screenwriter
Guillermo Arriaga, The Burning Plain, which stars Colin Farrell and Charlize
Theron; and Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke.

Mickey Rourke stars in 'The Wrestler' another American film competing in
this year's festival

But those who stay the full Venice course will be depending heavily on
Mueller's judgement, for he has assembled a programme of films from all over
the world by people that very few have ever heard of. Take Encarnacao Do
Demonio, the third part in the trash-horror trilogy by the Brazilian director
Jose Mojica Marins, or Birdwatchers, set among tribal people in the Amazon, by
the Italian director Marco Bechis.

The latter film gives an idea of what Mueller is up to. Bechis's film is
"a highly anticipated picture", according to Variety, "which
Mueller booked early". It tells of the extinction of an Amazonian tribe
by farmers' land grabs; the Brazilian-born director has worked on it for
years, and most of the actors are tribespeople.

Venice, in other words, cannot do without Hollywood glitz, but the meat of
the festival is something else. The film critic Lee Marshall writes in Screen
International: "Venice 2008 is one of the clearest illustrations to date
of the identity crisis the traditional, all-inclusive film festival is facing.
It has been clear for some time that the age of the auteur is over; these days
even dedicated, high-frequency viewers generally choose films by buzz rather
than director." Marshall quotes Mueller as saying: "Cinema is
(almost) no longer cinema ... The type of 'classic' contemporary cinema such
as Venice seemed designed to support has finally run out of steam. The idea of
a 'modern' cinema that lasts 50 years is a contradiction in terms."

Kim
Basinger stars in the drama 'The Burning Plain'

The roster of auteurs feted by Venice in the past is long and includes many
of the greatest directors of the 20th century, including Visconti and
Antonioni, John Huston and Elia Kazan, Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. The veteran
Italian director Ermanno Olmi, whose Tree of Wooden Clogs won Cannes in 1978,
is another, and Tuesday night's "pre-opening" was dedicated to him.

This year Mueller is nudging festival-goers to expand their minds and make
room not only for the latest Japanese animation "Ponyo on the cliff by
the sea" by Hayao Miyazaki (and the reclusive director is even expected
to attend) but also The Sky Crawlers by another Japanese manga master, Mamoru
Oshii.

And more than any Venice festival in recent years, this one belongs to
Italy, which has four films in competition. With the success of Italian films
at Cannes this year, there is much hype swirling around of an Italian
renaissance, but talk of a return to the Dolce Vita years is misleading, There
are no contemporary equivalents of Visconti, Pasolini, Fellini or the rest.
What you have instead is a succession of fascinatingly different films, often
by directors with an oblique relationship to the country.

All four Italian films in competition score highly in the non-obvious
ratings: Birdwatchers is a low-key domestic drama by veteran Pupi Avati (his
46th film since 1970) that Mueller says is the "zenith" of his
career; then there's The Seed of Discord, a southern Italian comedy about
machismo and sterility, and A Perfect Day by Ferzan Ozpetek who, though
Turkish by birth, works in Italy.

None of them has the strong international allure of the big Italian winners
at Cannes this year, Il Divo, a caustic and fantastical political biography of
Giulio Andreotti, and Gomorrah, based on the best-selling non-fiction account
of the gangs of Naples. Mueller is saying: "Trust me, these films are
worth everybody's time." He adds: "We go look for the vitality of
cinema wherever it is hidden – be it in popular works, [or] in auteur
cinema, it makes no difference to us."

He would claim that he has earned the trust that he demands. This is his
fourth year as festival director, and he has been signed for another four. But
2008 is likely to be his toughest year for several reasons.

Venice 2008 is light on American films because the long-running writers'
strike kept many of them blocked in the pipeline. "Many [US] films were
not ready," says Mueller. And with some of the others it was a close-run
thing – The Wrestler, he jokes, will be "a wet-print premiere".
But that was a factor all of the festivals have had to deal with.

The Wrestler trailer (put the sound down -it's terrible)

Filming of Darren Aronofsky's The
Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke at the 2/9 CZW show in South Philadelphia.
This Scene is the end of the Hardcore match featuring Rourke's character Randy
"The Ram" Robinson against CZW wrestler Necro Butcher.

And unique problems remain in Venice. Work has begun on a new film festival
complex on the Lido which, when it finally opens, will give Venice the
world-class facilities for which Mueller has been clamouring since he came on
board. Until then, the festival hobbles on with all the peculiar challenges
the sinking city presents. A threatened strike by water taxis was no more than
what one would expect, and raised the pleasing prospect of Clooney and Pitt
schlepping through the canals on the vaporetti along with everyone else. The
deputy mayor quickly condemned the strike as illegal, but it helped to draw
attention to the features that make Venice the most exorbitant film festival
in the world.

"Venice is ferociously expensive," a Hollywood publicity chief,
Jonathan Rutter, told Variety. "What you manage to accomplish at Cannes,
and to a lesser extent at Venice, is a great junket, but in Venice the hotels
are obscenely expensive and not very good, it costs a fortune to rent
interview space, and the service is appalling. Then you've got the cost of the
boats, because all of the really big stars want to stay at the Cipriani."
The same newspaper reported that to launch Atonement at Venice last year cost
$1m, the sort of sums which get people thinking in recessionary times.

But with his curious mix of the famous and the obscure, established and
left field, Marco Mueller insists that he knows what he is doing. "The
choices I made this year confirm an identity for the festival," he says.
"But I definitely want Venice to stay pluralistic and
contradictory."